Exaile is a pretty decent music player for GNOME written in PyGTK which comes with features like tabbed playlists, lyrics fetching, radio support, file browser, support for dynamic and smart playlists, cover support, 10-band equalizer and more. The latest version was released a few days ago and comes with several bug fixes and minor issue fixes.

Clementine gains more and more popularity with its port to KDE4 based upon the Amarok 1.4 player, and the latest version bundles a fair amount of new features. In case you didn’t try it yet, Clementine is a free, cross-platform music player available for Linux, Windows and Mac. Before proceeding let me say that this is a really, really improved release which shows a good amount of work has be put into it.

The first Amarok 2.4 beta, codenamed “Closer”, was released just a few days ago, on December 7, and it looks very promising. It comes with quite long list of new features, improvements and bug fixes, and among the top highlights are a collection scanner rewritten from scratch, option to transcode tracks when dragging and dropping them to the local collection, support for iPod Touch 3G devices, writing statistics and covers directly in files. These are not all though.

Compiling from source in Debian Squeeze Beta 2 could have been a real pain, but thanks to the apt-get build-dep command (and a few other dependencies) the compilation process went quite smooth. Before proceeding to the review, let me list some of the new features which come with this release: